Quantum's rook-ey move, software pawns and is cheque in mail for tape?

Plus resistive RAM news – it's a week in storage chess

Storage roundup At the end of this week we can lift the lid just a little on Quantum's mystery Castle storage project, say that the latest 12TB LTO tape format is coming nearer and add a few tidbits about GPDR, NAS in the cloud and Tintri array automation.

Crossbar

Crossbar showed its ReRAM technology at the 2017 SMIC Technology Symposium in Beijing on Thursday, October 12, 2017. It presented its thoughts on the current state of ReRAM technology and targeted applications for both embedded and stand-alone non-volatile memory products. It's saying ReRAM-based products can show massive battery energy savings for IoT and wearables applications.

Druva

Cybersecurity consultancy outfit BSI Cybersecurity and Information Resilience is partnering with Druva and adding its Data Management-as-a-Service platform to its offerings.

Basically it detects and protects critical data across the enterprise and helps customers comply with initiatives such as GDPR which restrict what they can do with stored personal data.

Morro Data

Morro Data is set to announce an updated CloudNAS offering, which provides file services for small and medium enterprises. More specifically it's a platform that combines cloud storage with file storage, multi-office sync, and data recovery. This 3-in-1 cloud filer offering is up on its website but more underlying product is coming

Nutanix

Nutanix could be set for a great first fiscal 2018 quarter if William Blair financial analyst Jason Ader is to be believed. He writes: "Recent VAR discussions point to broad adoption of Nutanix products (including Dell XC-branded appliances running Nutanix software) in the October quarter, across both the midmarket and large enterprise.

"Specifically, our checks suggest a very strong quarter for large deals, including multiple deals in the high seven-figure range (several of these in the federal vertical)."

Ader also thinks on-premises IT equipment sales are having a renaissance.

Quantum

Quantum's mystery Castle project is a storage product being developed by an in-house but separate engineering team based in Seattle. It has a website, Castle.io, and a Ceph-based open source product called Rook.io which provides POSIX-compliant file, block and S3/Swift object storage for cloud-native environments.

Its website says it runs as a cloud-native service for optimal integration with applications in need of storage, and handles the heavy-lifting behind the scenes such as provisioning and management. Rook is designed to run as a native Kubernetes service and offers storage for Kubernetes apps through persistent volumes.

Rook is a self-managing service and supports hyper-scale or hyper-converged environments. There is a Rook blog and documentation available here.

Spectra Logic

Spectra Logic has announced an LTO-8 pre-purchase programme. This was presaged back in July. LTO-8 tapes hold 12TB of raw data and a 360MB/sec raw bandwidth. The current LTO-7 tape generation numbers are 6TB and 300MB/sec bandwidth.

The Spectra TFinity ExaScale Tape Library configured with LTO-8 will deliver 58PB of compressed storage capacity in a three-frame footprint and up to 1.6EB of compressed storage capacity in its largest 44 frame configuration.

Spectra says its pre-purchase customers will have access to LTO-7 drives and media for use until LTO-8 technology becomes available. Pre-purchase customers will be priority recipients of LTO-8 drives and media, allowing them to be among the first to gain the capacity and performance advantages of LTO-8.

Its CEO and founder, Nathan Thompson, said: “Spectra foresees the availability of LTO-9 at 24TB per tape cartridge in two years; LTO-10 at 48TB in four years; LTO-11 at 96TB in six or seven years; and LTO-12 at 190+TB in eight to nine years. I firmly believe that no other commercial data storage technology available now or on the horizon, will keep pace with or fulfill the world’s increasing demand for cost-effective, long-term data storage like tape technology.”

Syneto

Europe-based Syneto has a HYPERSeries 2000 hyper-converged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) product line to slot in under its existing 3000 series.

Syneto says there are two hyperconverged units: a primary on which applications run under normal circumstances, and a DR unit, from which all of the applications can be restarted if the primary is down. All virtual applications and file shares on the primary unit are backed up every 60 seconds, sand then automatically replicated to the DR unit, according to flexible SLAs. Any or all applications can be restarted and used on the DR unit in under 15 minutes, down from the eight hours average recovery time for traditional systems.

The trad system Syneto has in mind is a compute server (dual CPU, 64GB of RAM), a switch (1GB) and a dual controller SAN/NAS with a hardware raid controller that has 4GB of cache, 8 disks and no read/write flash caching capabilities.

These Syneto HCIAs use RAM caching, come with SynetoOS v4.0 and will be orderable from October 15.

Tintri

Tintri has a 3.1 release of its automation toolkit that provides a set of APIs and SDKs that allow for the standardisation, repeat and abstraction of workflows for optimal storage performance with its storage arrays. It supports synchronous replication and has the ability to initiate failovers. The main elements are a REST API, Python SDK, and PowerShell toolkit.

+RegComment

Really, a 12TB tape in the week that Western Digital said it sees a 100TB disk drive by 2032, and Samsung confirmed its QLC flash developments, and we're supposed to be impressed?

Yes, we are, and we are - impressed. That 96TB tape will arrive around 2025 and will be cheaper per TB than disk drives of that time, and they will be cheaper than the least expensive flash at that time, if WDC is to be believed.

We're not going to see cost crossovers for capacity flash and capacity disk, or for capacity disk and capacity tape.

What we'll likely see are a reduced market for tape in the sense that moderately fast access archival storage will go to disk and away from tape.

Relatively faster access nearline storage will move to QLC flash away from disk but bulk online data access will stay on disk for years yet, and, like tape, there will be a residual and long-tail disk market even if flash-based nearline storage becomes mainstream. ®